10X Growth with Brandon Dawson

Unknown Speaker 0:15
what’s up? This is George G and the time is right to welcome today’s guest strong and powerful. BRANDEN DAWSON. Brandon, are you ready to do this? I am. Thank you for having me on your show. excited to have you on let’s go. Brandon is a co founder and CEO of CARDONE ventures which he started with Grant Cardone. He’s the creator of the 10x growth conferences. He’s an entrepreneur, coach, speaker and problem solver. Brandon excited to have you on tell us a bit about your personal life some more about your work, why you do what you do? Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on your show. So I partnered with Grant Cardone, about 42 months ago, my wife and I did and to launch CARDONE ventures, we’re a services and educational organization for helping small to mid sized business owners that range between a million and 100 million to next their business. So we have businesses, we work with that range between, like I said, 1 million up to several 100 million dollars of size. And my expertise, I sold my previous business to partnering with Grant in 2016 for 77 times EBIT, da 151 million, it was one of the highest values ever paid for a private company. And then we took a billion dollar public company from 1 billion to four and a half billion in 36 months. And then I took all my IP and all the programs I’ve developed over the last 25 years and partnered with Grant and we’ve deployed it into the TEDx community. Amazing. So 42 months,

Unknown Speaker 1:44
is that just the way that your brain counts? I count by month, how long I’ve been in business. So So think about this, my expertise in building businesses without needing money. It’s through collaboration through revenue share agreements, it’s, it’s by having extreme discipline across the 10 elements, you need to have a successful business. And we started this business 42 months ago, and in 42 months, we’ve done 130 million in revenue. So so, you know, I like to count every single month last month, we did 10 million, the same month, last year was 4 million in the month before that was one the year before. So So I track everything based on trajectory and month over month growth, because that’s how we teach business owners to do it.

Unknown Speaker 2:29
Love it. So congratulations and all the success. And I mean, the TEDx conferences have, at least from my perspective, become just ubiquitous. They’ve they’ve, they’re there. They’re everywhere. How many folks have have gone through how many labs have you impacted? Yeah, well, you know, that was something that I was very fortunate. It’s one of the reasons I partner with Grant Cardone, he is the founder of the next movement. For the last, you know, 10 years, he has been doing growth conferences since 2015. And the thing is, is to check him out and do my due diligence, he was touting that he was going to get 35,000 People in Marlins Stadium in 2019. On Superbowl weekend, I called bullshit. My wife and I flew out to see if this thing was real or not. And we were absolutely blown away, to have 30 to share that stadium with 34 35,000. People want to remarkable event. And since then, we’ve been doing growth constants I partnered with grant we have anywhere from 35,000 down to after COVID hit with our smallest I think was four or 5000. We have our growth conference coming up in February in Las Vegas, this coming year and 2023. And we’ll have somewhere between six and 8000 people there. And so we love those growth conferences. And we also run several TEDx business boot camps every quarter as well. Awesome.

Unknown Speaker 3:52
So when when you look out at the landscape, what what do you see as the problem that you’re trying to solve for the you are solving? Well, 97.5% of all businesses under $100 million go out of business within 10 years, two thirds of those 100 million, under 100,000,030 1 million businesses under 100 million will go out of business for the first five years. And what we’re doing is I’ve got 20 years of research and development and automation and programs and leadership programs and things I’ve developed my mentors tested throughout 1000s of businesses. We now manage a portfolio in just 42 months have over 1,000,000,001 point 3 billion of businesses. What we the problem we solve is helping business owners avoid the catastrophic events that cause businesses to go out of business and in fact, create massive value faster by understanding the most important elements of growing and scaling a business and understanding people most importantly.

Unknown Speaker 4:56
Which do you like better? Do you like helping people avoid the problems or do the

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Proactiv work?

Unknown Speaker 5:02
Well, I like to see the results of intentional creation. You know, people ask me a lot about law of attraction law of attraction is real. But it comes from law of action, which then comes from law of intention. And most of these business owners don’t have an intention, they just, they’re just drifting. They’re just trying to be better trying to do bigger trying to have make more money. But that’s not an intention. That’s, that’s, that’s hoping that something or some external thing will help them. So So I love setting targets and accomplishing results and impacting lives. You know, John Maxwell is one of my top mentors. You know, he says true leadership is making other people’s success easy and being it by being an example to him. So I’m on a mission to help 1 million business owners impact our personal professional, personal, professional financial life through the business, and understanding most my businesses get to be bigger businesses, that’s 100 million people working with those business owners. So we have a huge mission here. We love it. And, and we pursue it every single day. I think that that’s awesome. So most are drifting. They they lack the intention, you find that that’s just because they don’t know what they ought to be thinking about or focused on. Or they’re just so busy working in the business that they can’t step back. A little bit of both. Yeah, well, you got it, you got to remember and this goes back to Michael Gerber’s event for 40 years, he’s been right. I mean, most people started their business because of what they didn’t want. They didn’t want to boss didn’t want to be told what to do didn’t want to be held accountable. And so a lot of those business owners think that people are like them. So what they do is they hire people and treat them the way they wanted to be treated. And it’s just not you cannot build a successful organization avoiding and ignoring your people hoping that they’re gonna figure it out. So novice business owners have to go through those cycles until they get frustrated enough that they realize I’m gonna hire people hold them accountable, make sure they do their job. And if they’re not, I’m going to remove them and bring somebody else in. And if you look at, statistically speaking,

Unknown Speaker 7:02
you’ve got 2% of the businesses under $100 million. So you got 31 and a half million businesses less than 2% have greater than 12 employees. So if you think about it, 98% of all businesses under 100 million have less than 12. And boys 25 million of those business owners work by themselves. So I think it’s they’re good people with most of the time, they have the right intentions, they want to do something bigger, better, more impactful. But if you look at the top three reasons they say they fail is no demand for product or service can’t find any good people and can’t get access to financing. The truth is, if you the business owner can’t create demand for your product or service, you shouldn’t really expect anybody else underneath you to be able to do it. And you certainly shouldn’t expect people to give you money. Right?

Unknown Speaker 7:53
What are as you look at the people that you’re serving, and your personal gifts and abilities and the self discipline that you’ve either been born with, and or curated and developed? What are some of those characteristics that you have to have to be successful in business these days? Yeah, great question. I don’t think you’re born with all this. I think it evolves over time based on your own personal resilience and determination to be better tomorrow than you were today. And the ability to be honest with yourself about where you’re the one that screwed everything up and be willing to fix that and change it in the next iteration of yourself. So I live and die by six core values. And I believe that in every conversation, I believe in every engagement, I need to somehow exemplify these six core values. And it’s the only thing I can own as me, you can’t control our own anybody else. So being the best version of yourself allows other people around you to be the best version of themselves. And so my six core values are inspiration, discipline, accountability, transparency, alignment, and results. And if you have those six things, and you try to embrace them and incorporate them, and all you do, and then just have the resilience to try to be the best version of yourself. And when you screw up going and showing people that you have the ability to have humility and apologize, and then get it back on track. Because you will become and you will surround yourself with the way you are law mirror, Maxwell talking, when you look in the mirror in your business, and there’s things you don’t like it’s a direct reflection of what you’re projecting into it. So if you want the outer aspects of your life to change, you have to first change the inner aspects of your life. And you can’t be a victim of circumstance. So So you just got it for me. I live by that I teach it and I see people that embrace that flourish because they lose excuse and they move to the success. I love it like that is those are incredible.

Unknown Speaker 9:46
How do you make decisions about things? How do you decide what to spend your resources on? Yeah, so low hanging fruit. You create enough probabilities, enough possibilities, enough conversations, you can see which conversations are true.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
acted in, you know, I have a saying real money doesn’t flow to people with big fancy degrees, real money doesn’t flow to great salespeople, real money flows to problem solvers. And to the extent you use your education and to the extent you use your people skills to communicate with people, you can solve bigger problems. And when you solve bigger problems, you create bigger rewards for everybody. So So when you ask, like, for me, it’s really about what’s the biggest problem I can solve that has the largest yield for the most amount of people. And if I can find it, and solve that problem, then I can promote it and get more people that want that problem solved for them. So I go to talk tracks of all the different areas, we help business owners grow and scale and create massive value personally, professionally, financially, there’s 10 elements to run a business and I just promote the 10 elements, and then somebody who’s struggling with one of them and raises their hand, they’re willing to engage us and then I gauge the competency, the the the, the true desire for that business owner to change. And I’ll just gravitate to people that want the biggest change, they’re willing to change themselves and we can create the biggest impact together. If you only have one thing you’re talking about, it really limits your ability to have people self select into what you offer.

Unknown Speaker 11:12
Have you always known that all along, you know, dude, look, I you know, I had the privilege of, you know, I didn’t go to college, I sucked out High School. The only reason I even passed was to get so I could play sports. And then I moved immediately from Corvallis, Oregon, where I was picking up walnuts working as a dishwasher being told that you’re going to be the least likely to succeed horrible as a student, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia and got an outside sales job and traveled around and knocked on doors and called on professionals and really honed in my skills. And at 25. I was making a lot of money, I had two little kids and a wife and decided to quit my job and become an entrepreneur. And and and I just, you know, I grinded, I made 100 presentations to be told to pound sand 99 times, right. And then that just continued on. And then I tried to raise my first million and I was told no 132 times, I just kept pushing and pushing until I broke through. And then all of a sudden, at 29 years old, I’ve got a public company ringing the bell on the American Stock Exchange 132 deals under my belt, raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and playing in a league. And I stopped listening to mentor, stop finding new mentors, and I got busy being busy, which cost me my job and cost me my net worth. And so I realized that there had to be a better way to do it. And most of the formulations I have today are multiple iterations of my failures, looking for mentors, solving those problems in real life, having the success and then teaching others how to do it, and then tracking their success. I don’t think any of this I don’t think anybody was just born with the gift to be successful. I think that takes so much work, so much determination, so much passion, and the ability to risk losing other things in your life like family and friends and people that don’t necessarily want to see you succeed, or they want to call you back to mediocrity, you just have to have that resilience. And so what you see today, and what you’re hearing today is the compounded effect of many failures being proved out in the in the marketplace impacting 1000s of lives, and creating an enormous amount of wealth for me and for the people I get to work with and have the pleasure to serve. And so the more you do, the faster you’re able to communicate it. I love it. What do you think about luck?

Unknown Speaker 13:22
I don’t think I mean, sure you can get lucky. But most people that get luck still screwed up. Look at how many people win the lotteries and piss it all away. So you know, I’ve been with people they’ve got lucky they some something happened and they got lucky. I think luck is always something I appreciate. But I really appreciate intentionality, hard work, determination, and the grit and grind of being so intentional about trying to make your goals and dreams happen. But you know, where the luck comes in is when you’re so intentional. And you evolve and develop yourself, the people you work with the people you communicate with, how you communicate, the things that you commit to doing and then doing like luck follows a whole lot of other principles.

Unknown Speaker 14:09
And we all get lucky on occasion, some get bad luck, some get good luck. But I’m not going to rely on luck for anything to happen for me, I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to rely on an overt determination to create impact. And

Unknown Speaker 14:23
what do you think about the

Unknown Speaker 14:26
the whole you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with? No 100% You know, what happened to me is, I had my mentors when I when I in my 20s and they were all people that were like $50 million. And I really looked at that was like man one day if I could get to 50 million, and I did everything they said to do but then all of a sudden, all of a sudden I found myself beyond being worth 50 million and I stopped looking for the people that were 300 million or 500 million. And so I kind of got lost and and so you know what I’ll tell you is is the more the more intentional you are about the things you

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Want to accomplish in your life, and the more intentional you are about gravitating to the people who are a living, breathing example, and I found through experience and then by partnering with Grant Cardone, it’s just entirely changed and accelerated my perspective. So this is one of the intentions when we went to that growth con conference. My wife and I, we had a goal, we wanted to build something together, we wanted to build something that complemented the 20 years of work I’d already done. We wanted to work with somebody we could enjoy, who was actively involved in building the business, we wanted to work with somebody that shared our morals and ethics and values. And and and then the fifth most important thing is I wanted somebody who had at least a 350 million or greater net worth, because that was my next target. And so back when I was in my 20s, I’ll never forget one of my mentors who was worth about $75 million. He said, you know, Warren Buffett was worth $10 million dollars. By the age of 27. He was worth

Unknown Speaker 15:57
75 million by the age of 45, or 46. And he was worth at 53, he was worth 350 million. Well, I hit my 20. At 28 years old, I was worth 10 million. The problem was at 31 years old, I was back down to only being worth 250,000. So I had it done, I lost it. But by the time I got to be 46 years old, I was worth 75 million. So I rebuilt, learn from my mistakes, rebuilt it and built it to 75 million. When I partnered with Grant and Elena one of our fifth requirements was they had to have a greater net worth of 350 million. So they get teach us educate us, show us how to do it. And you will be like the five people you surround yourself with. But you don’t need five people. Maybe sometimes you just need one or two great examples that that are willing to teach and show you. So now fast forward 42 months later, we revalue our companies and our investments on the second largest investor in CARDONE capital, are CARDONE ventures organizations worth hundreds of millions of dollars based on all the valuation methodologies that that external use, we have externally done. So I’ve hit my $350 million target in just three or four years working with Grant versus by myself, I had no visibility on how to do it, other than continue to do the things I was doing. So what I tried to tell everybody is, the more clear you are about what you want to do, if you’re a $1 million business owner, learn from a 10 or 100 million dollar guy, don’t be talking to a bunch of friends that are 500,000 to a million dollars. If you’re a $10 million business owner, don’t be talking to people that are 3 million and 8 million, don’t be talking to people that are 12 million talk to the people that are 100 million, like you have to have the you have to be willing to elevate yourself up and get into the circles of the right people. And usually you got to buy your way into that by offering something either money or exchange or something so that you can be influenced by that. And what I found is if you can complement those people and offer a collaboration that they can win with YouTube, there’ll be more incentivized to see us succeed. And that’s what we teach business owners and and I just think that you will be like the people you spend your time with. So be extremely careful about who those people are and what you’re learning from them. Yeah, I think that that’s one of the really exciting things about about all the work that you’re doing is is that’s essentially what you’re doing is you’re showing and giving the people what they need to grow their businesses and, you know, creating community around that as well and checking all the boxes. So I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Brandon, where can people learn more about you? And how can they get involved with the TEDx growth conferences and everything else you’re working on? Yeah, great. So the easiest is Instagram at Brandon M. Dawson because we’re on the move. I was started in Miami this morning. I’m in Scottsdale today I’ll be in Vegas tomorrow. So we’re usually posting where we’re going and what we’re doing and then what our events are. If you’re interested in any of our events, you can go either to grant cardone.com forward slash events or CARDONE ventures.com forward slash events. I would just leave this for your listeners. You know, until I realized that I had to start setting my own personal professional financial goals. And until I realized I had to work with other people to help them set theirs and then show them how to succeed in theirs through working with me so I could get to mine. I was doing everything hard. The real way to accelerate success is to inspire and empower other people around you and give them the gift of investing in them so they can succeed and just be smart enough to configure it so when they’re winning, you’re winning. Love it. If you enjoyed as much as I did show Brandon your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, find brand on Instagram at Brandon M. Dawson link that in the notes of the show, and then go to grant cardone.com and check out the events area and make your way to some of the upcoming 10x crop conferences. Thanks good, Brandon. Thank you for having me on your show. And until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

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